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Reviews

"I spent the first few hours playing as a defender – until the amazing adaptive AI starting kicking my ass. I decided to switch to Attacker and instantly felt like I was experiencing something completely new." - IndieGameMagaziine

"It’s a bold and compulsive take on the tower defense genre, though, with a flabbergasting range of options to play with, and some of the most focused tweaking I’ve ever seen." - Honest Gamers

"With quick, furious battles and scads of customization options for both attackers and defenders, I can see this one eating up many enjoyable hours." - Gaming Nexus

About This Game

Gratuitous Tank Battles (GTB) is a unique hybrid of tower-defense, strategy, simulation and RTS. Set in an alternate history timeline where World War I never ends, you are the commander of allied forces fighting right up to the year 2114, where Mechs and lasers are used alongside tanks and rifles. The war continues across Europe, with the allied commanders still locked into the optimistic patriotism of the 1900s.

A tower-defense game where you can play as the attacker has been done before, but GTB lets you play the same maps as attacker OR defender, and even lets you save out your attack as a recording to defend against. An online-challenge system lets you upload your custom maps and custom units and attacks for other players to fight against. Speaking of custom units, GTB doesn't have simple pre-built units, but allows you to build them from individual components, and even design the appearance and colors of every single unit. An unlocks system gradually reveals more modules, abilities and unit 'hulls' to experiment with.

GTB also features an integrated map editor that lets you trivially change and tweak existing maps, or create entirely new ones, and the process of sharing these custom maps with friends is built right into the game. Combine it with Steam achievements, community, cloud support and more, and you should be kept busy fighting over Europe for another two hundred years./>

Key Features

Alternate History Tower Defense: Fight a 200 year war to save Europe

Play as attacker or defender on any map, even custom ones

Fight with Infantry, Tanks, Turrets and Mechs

Optional Adaptive AI adjusts to your play style and tactics for endless variety

Customizable units allow you to design your own personal army

Built-in level editor makes creating a new map a breeze

Save out your attack and play against it as the defender

Online map and challenge-sharing system allows you to fight your friends armies

I personally enjoyed this. While the game can be a bit slow at times, it's rarely tedious or boring. The fact that you can change each unit's module allows you to specialize units, such as an expensive death machine or cheap units focusing on speed, damage, or a middling blend. Furthermore, while the shield-armor system (and those being better dealt with by ballistic and energy weapons respectively) isn't anything new, it just adds to the amount of thought that has to go into what units you make and in what order you deploy them.

The game may get a bit formulaic (I've found an effective strategy to consistenyl be a "conga line of victory", wherin it's just a constant stream of tanks/mechs and supply trucks with repair truck escorts, and burning any extra supply on random units like medium tanks or soldiers for other paths), but it's still fun.

This game is good. It's really good. If you love making customized units that you can later on watch in combat, then this is a game for you. As for gameplay, I can describe this one as a combination of Close Combat series (the top down camera style reminded me of those games) and Anomaly Warzone series.

The thing that I loved the most is that you can create your own units based on a variety of hulls, and once your'e done with the campaign maps, you can go and play any map that other players have created. You can even create your own maps and upload them so that everyone can give them a try.

I am not saying this game is a triple A quality title, but it's a really neat and well presented indie product that can give you many hours of fun, and it definitely earned a rating of at least 75%. When you look at some mindless and pointless games that have been awarded with 90+ by the Steam community (Goat Simulator being one of those) you can only begin to question how ignorant the community is nowadays, but trust the gaming veterans like me and get this game, you won't regret it. IF you're still indecisive, wait for a discount.

Ok, maybe i need to have more time to discover how to use my units correctly (4.4hrs when i wrote this) and maybe i suck ♥♥♥, but i can't help feel that there is just way too much going on to take in. GSB did feel like that at first but i think what kept me playing that is because i was able to distinguish better what worked and what didnt. With GTB however, it feels more like, "spam more than the enemy can handle" kind of game.

When i tested out my own custom units as an attacker, i did win, but i couldn't quite make out how i did with what designs were effective and it felt like it was just all about spamming faster than the enemy can place its units down. I did see a couple of units really stand out but that was all i was able to take in and didn't feel as if they made a real impact to the game and was more about having more guns than my enemy to break through their defences.

As the defender, different story, after a solid 40mins of deciding what to put in my turrets and so forth i used them in battle, but it seems as though my theory of "the spammier the better" really came to fruitition as my enemy was constiantly fielding units that eventually meant i couldnt keep up with stopping the flow with the supplies i needed. I admit, i may have made classical n00b errors, such as not using the speed settings to help me better make sense of the battle (D'oh), and i noticed how most of my turrets were fitted into Anti-Armor roles. Maybe i just need to go back to the drawing board like i did with GSB, but honestly, after playing a few games of what felt like "the spammier the better", i saw no point and scrapped all of my turret designs.

You see with Space Battles i was able to figure out roughly where i went wrong if i lost a battle. Sometimes it was a design that ended up being obsolete with enemy designs or not being able to fill the role i intend it to. But with Tank Battles it didn't feel like that at all. It felt more like all of my units were at fault and the unit stats at the end did nothing to help me at all. I just couldn't make sense of all the information being given to me.

Though as i said at the beginning, i probably suck and need to put more time into this game for its goodness to really shine, but it felt like a real dissapointment from its Space counterpart, and besides, i have never been one for Tower Defence style games anyway as i always find the genre having little strategy and mainly focusing on who spams best. Tank Battles seems to be the same story then as always for me, just with customisation of units being a nice feature to it all.

5/10. A game that looked promising along with the customisation features but maybe that is due to my love of its space daddy counterpart. Overall, i am dissapointed, hope i can come back to this and it convinces me to change my mind.

If you love TD games, this may be for you but may not be exactly your cup of tea, and all the customisation and info that this game bombards you with may put you off in the end, aside from that, i advise you save your £6.99 (£11.98 with the DLC included) for a rainy day and look elswere.

And as for me, i am off to play GSB in order to cheer myself up by blowing alien ships up for no apparent reason, at least i can make sense out of all the chaos...oh well...

I love it. And for everyone who hates it just because it's different from Gratuitous Space Battles, and base your argument on hating it on that, go away. It's simply part of the same series of games, but that doesn't mean it can't be different. Just because it's different from the last game doesn't mean it's horrible. In fact, I love it. The customization aspect of both games is great, the mechanics from both games are solid, the graphics aren't the best, but I like the art style. It seems that many people hate that it's a Tower Defense, or maybe hate the asymmetric gameplay. Personally, I like both games and have both installed.

I don’t like GSB. So I didn’t expect much from GTB. This time I was right. This game is just plain bad. I can’t imagine someone, who will like it. Battles are slow and tedious. After starting the game I have no idea, what the hell is going on. I built couple of defense structures and then watched the battle. There are some screens for managing god knows what, however it was so unintuitive… I somehow won the first mission and then it struck me. Whoa, this is so much not fun!

Gratuitous Tank Battles can be an incredibly fun and rewarding game. Remember the fun it was to build your own custom ships on games like Master of Orion? GTB is a tower defense game that's like that for every single unit or turret. From the smallest cheap gun to the big strongholds, from inexpensive recruit infantry to heavily shielded mechs.

Designing the units is simple, but the management of new and older designs can be a little busywork. But this kind of complexity that usually lacks on modern games is very welcomed.

The very fact that this games plays as both a traditional tower defense game and an inverted tower defense game is a testimony to its flexibility. It's a robust selection of units with great variation of strategies you can use to beat the enemy.

At least for me, the fact that you can design, customize and name every unit in the field adds to the enjoyment and creates a very fun experience when your guys are winning a battle. It's just most interesting when that tank unit you built to be fast and strong barely makes it to the finish line.

Building units is not everything, and the battles are intense and complex.

Apart from the built-in campaign, you can edit your own scenarios, and upload and download challenges from other users.

If you like Tower Defense games or games with customization, this is a very good choice.

Gratuitous Tank Battles is an amazing Tower Defense game with an unpredictable AI and tons of customization. In this Tower Defense game, you can play both as the defender AND the attacker. It has multiple weapons, hulls and equipment to unlock for your units. You can also use the simple map editor to make your own crazy-dizzy-complicated (and probably boring...) maps that others can share with other players online. It takes small space and downloads very fast, so you wont have any problems installing it. And now to end this ASDDFDFSGSRTRHEKRUGNDJAIEWHUEAWHASGDAWUEGAS

GTB is a forward thinking tower defence/RTS hybrid for all you serial tinkerers out there. It comes with a 12 mission campaign right off the bat and coupled with the ability to attack or defend (two modes of play which feel like entirely different experiences in themselves) you’ve got essentially 24 missions before you go anywhere near the game's extensive customisation options. Between the unit and level editor, the built-in online challenge sharing and the adaptive AI that's capable of wielding your own designs against you, there’s a potentially limitless amount of content on offer here. Highly recommended.

I bought this game because I enjoyed Gratuitous Space Battles enormously. What a disappointment! This game appears to be a quick and dirty attempt to profit from GSB. You get a few maps to learn from and then nothing but the same map over and over and over, with suggestions that you should play on-line to get a better experience. Maybe I am missing something, but I can find none of the maps shown in the Steam advertisement available as single player mode in the game.

Though I really enjoyed Gratuitous Space Battles, I found this one thoroughly inferior. The customization found in GSB simply doesn't exist in GTB. There's no actual modification available, really. You simply unlock new items and those new items are, basically, always better. Whereas in GSB, you had to balance crew-size, energy, weight, cost; in GTB it's basically cost and that's it. NOT recommended.

It's got mechs, tanks, infantry all blowing up or bleeding. Tower defence at its most glorious or depressing depending. Also the developer spent 1.5 days working on infantry footprints. That's love baby.

Gratuitous Tank Battles is a polished tower defense game that offers a staggering level of unit customizability, a painless registration process, good video settings detection as well as a thorough tutorial. Both widescreen and the Steam Overlay are supported, but there is no controller support. The terrain graphics are subpar both flat and bland, but the units are 3D and the full zoom helps compensate somewhat. The music is quite well done and compliments the gameplay well. For strategists that like a deep level of customization and a large variety of scenarios with which to test them, this is an excellent purchase.

Currently plagued with odd steam problems now, but otherwise, still playable when you create a desktop shortcut instead. The unit customization is fun, the unlocks system still rewards you when you lose, and the combat is very frantic and fun when you have the right setup. Tis' a shame that I'm not a tower defense junkie, and I personally found it somewhat boring after a while. Not a bad game, but I hope they provide good support, additional game modes, and some DLC in the future.